Attic Sanctimonious

There's a short version of this review that goes like this: King Diamond and Cradle of Filth can fucking eat it. The reason why those two well-respected bands need to get Sanctimonious into their cake-holes as soon as possible is because Attic have managed to do exactly what those bands have been doing for decades and, frankly, wiped the floor with almost everything they have released. That's not to say that listeners will be tipping their copies of Abigail and The Eye into an incinerator any time soon, nor that CoF's latest Hammer of the Witches was anything less than astonishingly vibrant, but more to emphasize the fact that Attic have accepted all of the worthy features from those two bands, addressed the problems with the style, and come up with something that need not be embarrassed to stand among the best in occult metal.



The influence from King Diamond and Mercyful Fate is extremely obvious, copying from the same blueprint of melodic riffing accompanied by plentiful sinuous leads, storytelling drama that arrives by way of a plethora of vocal gymnastics, and a dark, occult tone running through the whole thing. However, Attic are not direct imitators of the style forged by those bands in the 1980s, modernizing elements of the sound, such as the more forceful riffing that crosses over into thrash and black metal on several memorable occasions, the infrequent use of blastbeats, and rather more extensive song structures that bear some resemblance to the theatrics of Hell's Human Remains. In those distinctions between the Germans and the Danish source, Cradle of Filth may well be the factor to fill the gaps, owing to the band's more extreme sound, knottier songwriting, and also the last point on which Sanctimonious resoundingly succeeds - its religious concept.